The work-reflection-learning cycle - Department of Computer and ...

Work, learning and reflection: theoretical background
members of the teams are simultaneously members of other communities such as the
profession for which the education is preparing the students, and the students‟ personal
circles of friends. There are frequently different levels of expertise among the students
with respect to the practice of the project. For instance, in the case of SE projects,
programming skills often vary greatly within a team. From a CoP perspective, team
members‟ work and learning thus takes place within and across communities with
varying goals, norms and practices, and with expertise in these practices differing
among community members and over time. In the thesis, team members‟ multiple
memberships in different communities are a core issue in the research papers P1 and P2.
A potential arena for learning in the context of CoPs is the boundaries between
communities. Individuals who are simultaneously members of two communities can
serve as brokers, contributing to the transfer and transformation of knowledge from one
community into the other. This typically involves artifacts (Gal et al. 2005; Star 1990)
integral to the practice of each of the communities and serving as boundary objects.
Changes to the boundary objects (e.g. through collaboration), may have implications for
the communities involved and be a source of learning and change. In the thesis, the
issue of brokering is important in P2.
In research papers P3 and P4, which focus on current use of lightweight technologies in
SE student teams, the CoP concept helps shed light on the differences between activity
within the team and that which involves collaboration with other stakeholders (e.g.
customer, supervisor) and can be considered cross-community collaboration.
A student SE team can also be considered as a particular type of CoP, namely a learning
community (Riel and Polin 2004). Riel and Polin provide a categorization of online
learning communities which is also appropriate for characterizing communities of
learners that are fully or partially collocated, such as student SE team. The categories
are intended by the authors to be analytic categories, and a specific learning community
may have the characteristics of one or more of them:
Task-based learning communities are “groups of people organized around a task
who work intently together for a specified period of time to produce a product.
While the specific group may not, in the strictest sense, share all of the
properties of a community, the people who participate in them often experience
a strong sense of identification with their partners, the task, and the organization
that supports them.” (Riel and Polin 2004, p.20)
Practice-based learning communities are larger groups with shared goals that
offer their members richly contextualized and supported arenas for learning.
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